Patients' ratings of hospitals available online

March 29, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - What do former patients think about the care they received at your local hospitals? The government wants to make it easier for you to find out. Federal health officials in recent years have made strides to improve transparency in health care. But measuring how well hospitals do their job can be technical. New patient satisfaction scores, which went online Friday, cover basic premises that just about every hospital patient and their family members can understand. For example:

Did doctors treat patients with courtesy and respect?

How often were the room and bathroom cleaned?

Was the area around the room quiet?

Did the patient get immediate help after pressing a call button? Those questions were included in a survey used to evaluate more than 2,500 hospitals around the country. ''You don't have to be a technical expert to understand this information and its implications,'' said Joyce Dubow, senior adviser at the AARP, the senior advocacy group. ''If you ask somebody whether they were cared for with respect, they get that.'' Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said consumers - and the Medicare program - pay for care whether it's good or not. Informing consumers about how well a hospital performs a particular task or how much it charges for a particular service will serve as incentives for health care providers to do better. ''The current sector is all about volume,'' Leavitt said. ''The future is about value.'' The Web site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, lets consumers compare up to three hospitals. Users will be able to see the scores for such things as how often nurses communicated well with their patients; hospitals nationwide averaged 73 percent on that particular question. Consumers will also be able to see how well the average hospital in their state fared on each question. The data was collected by hospitals from a random sample of patients from October 2006 and June 2007.